David Trautrimas Negotiates the Hyper-real and the Unreal

(above: David Trautrimas, "The Cooler Factory";

right: 'The Typewriter Factory")

With this posting I introduce readers to an artist, David Trautrimas, whose work the gallery carries courtesy of Trautrimas' representing Toronto gallery, LE Gallery. It is relatively rare for such an arrangement within the same city but in this case it is the result of our joint enthusiasm for Trautrimas' works that combine visual and conceptual playfulness with a novel employment of photography . Many of his works disassemble everyday objects into their component parts and then rescales and reconstitutes them into building-like industrial structures that we are encouraged to imagine as the progenitors of the objects. A review by David Jager in NOW provides a good perspective on Trautrimas' work.

Other works are wonderfully whimsical fantasies constructed from the integration and juxtaposition of objects whose real-life scale is inverted. Below are "Despite the great sausages no one ever came to Doug's BBQ" and "You can't get blood from a stone but you can get juice from a brick."

Stay tuned for notice of Trautrimas' next show, opening September 24 at LE Gallery.

Globe and Mail previews the Future Projections line-up

Check out David McGinn's Where art and cinema meet: on the wall, all over town in the weekend Globe and Mail. McGinn overviews the idea behind all seven, including the gallery's "up-and-comer" Samuel Chow, of the Toronto International Film Festival's program linking film and the visual arts in its Future Projections program.

McGinn quotes Noah Cowan, Artistic Director of the (soon to be) new home of TIFF and co-curator of the Future Projections program with Laurel MacMillan:

"We've focused really strongly on what you might call a subset of media art which relates to the culture and legacy of film," he says. "Film began as spectacle," says Mr. Cowan. "It began as this weird, wild, overwhelming phenomenon at the end of the Industrial Revolution.

"And I think the visual artists we're featuring this year really capture that spirit.

"Our first priority is to ensure that Future Projections speaks to the diversity of art-going experiences in Toronto. So we work with what I call the leading public institutions in the city around art and culture, plus what we consider to be the more intelligent private galleries," says Mr. Cowan.

Note that the article references Chow's I'm Feeling Lucky exhibition as a "mash-up of online videos." The use of 'found' video is only part of the transformations that Chow engages in with his work. He also includes found photographs and audio, but just as importantly artistic renderings and transformations of the raw material of Internet surfingf experience through what can best be called new-media painting.

I'm Feeling Lucky opens 6-9 PM this coming Wednesday, September 3, at the gallery (all welcome).

Performance Art 2.0? - Check out IMPROVeverywhere.com

A truly cool website, reflecting an equally cool (do people still say cool?) social art phenomenon, just came to my attention (thank to the Webscape segment of BBC World News' Click show). Improv Everywhere has a real aesthetic and at the same time a refreshing fun factor. Judge for yourselves what 'it' 'is' from an art perspective, but otherwise just enjoy. Here are three recent "missions", as the Improv Everywhere folks call them, that are really neat (I know no one else uses that any more):

Frozen Grand Central Station

Human Mirror

The Camera Flash Experiment [on Brooklyn Bridge]

September '08 to January '09 exhibitions at the gallery

Today's posting is a consolidated list of the four upcoming exhibitions at the gallery, each of which has been mentioned one way or another in previous postings. You can click through to the exhibition page for each and see such images as are already available. The information on each exhibition page, notably for the McLeod and Russell/Shingray exhibitions, will be updated now and then.











Samuel Chow, I'm Feeling Lucky, in association with Toronto International Film Festival: Future Projections, Sept 3 - 29, 2008














Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady, Trap / Elusion, Oct 1 - Oct 26, 2008 (opening reception Oct 9, 6-9 PM)












Christian McLeod, Further Unmanned Strategies, Oct 30 - Nov 23, 2008
















Don Russell and Amir Shingray, Snow, Nov 27 - January 17 (with a gallery break December 14-January 7)

Literarture: John Ralston Saul's THE NEXT BEST THING

Many readers, especially Canadians, will know of John Ralston Saul as a leading public intellectual whose non-fiction critical-commentary and philosophical has had a marked uptake in social discussion and public debate. Books like Voltaire's Bastard, The Unconscious Civilization, and Reflections of a Siamese Twin are viewed by many as exemplars of non-fiction that is both reflective and literary. But, whenever I mention it, I find almost no one is aware of his early novels. With this post, I wish to rectify this.

I mentioned in an earlier "Literarture" posting on Arturo Perez-Reverte's THE PAINTER OF BATTLES that I have a collecting passion for literature in three fields -- legal fiction, art fiction, and political thrillers/espionage fiction. This includes first editions of all of John Ralston Saul's first four novels, including the taut and lean inaugural book, The Birds of Prey, a cause celebre book in France (written while JRS lived in Paris during a certain globe-trotting, swashbuckling period in his life) that I recommend highly.

The specific book I wish to recommend in this posting is the second in the Field Trilogy books, named after a journalist named Field who knocks about Southeast Asia forever looking for his moral compass. This second Field book is called The Next Best Thing. (The other two Field books are Baraka, the first, and The Paradise Eaters, the second.) Here is the blurb on the book from JRS's own site, which is a little tighter and shorter than the book jacket blurb of the first edition:

James Spenser is a man obsessed by beauty – a collector haunted by his almost supernatural response to art. A sophisticated, complex character, he would seem the last man on earth to turn to theft. But his target is exceptional: twenty 11 th-century Buddhas from the deserted city of Pagan, Burma – their value, $1 million each.

Teaming up in Thailand with Field, a drunken expatriate journalist, and Blake, an American Baptist minister-cum-guerilla leader, Spenser finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a deadly web of private and public feuds: from the bizarre relationship between Blake and his girlfriend Marea, with whom Spenser, too, becomes involved, to the bloody rivalries of the guerrilla armies and opium dealers vying for power at any cost. Ruthless leaders and desperate individuals are brought face to face in a life and death struggle for supremacy.

It is the character study and psychological profiling of the impassioned art lover who becomes an obsessed collector, and then an immoral looter of ancient art, that many will find a fascinating aspect of a book that stands firmly in the Graham Greene tradition of the literary political (and indeed adventure) thriller. JRS' insights into the human condition wrapped in a taut fictional narrative deserve to be better known, and enjoyed.

That said, I notice that Vintage Canada's website only has Baraka, the first of the Field Trilogy books, listed as in print (since the book was reissued in 1997 in trade paperback form) and available for purchase. As for The Next Best Thing, the online major book sellers source only three used copies. However, ABEBOOKS.COM reveals many more secondhand copies available, and that is where I would recommend you look for the book. If you go to THIS LINK, you can then narrow the search results on the page to correspond to booksellers nearest you.

Don Russell and Amir Shingray present "Snow" exhibition November 27 to January 17

From November 27 to December 14, and then January 7-17, Don Russell and Amir Shingray join forces in a two-person show called "Snow." Don Russell came to Ontario from a childhood in Newfoundland that included camping in snow drifts as high as he was while Amir Shingray came to Ontario from eastern Sudan where snow was almost beyond imagination. Each in his own way has studied the (surprisingly modest) place of snowscapes in both the history of Canadian painting and in contemporary painting, and learned from innovators from Franz Johnson to Jean-Paul Lemieux to David Milne to Peter Doig. For "Snow", each in his own way is producing work for the show that is guaranteed to forge new paths in connecting art and the white north of Canadian identity.

Above is Don Russell's largescale painting, "First Snow," while below is Amir Shingray's 30 x 30 inch "North of Here."

Final Don Russell largescale painting from Water Meditations series placed

The last available largescale painting from Don Russell's "Water Meditations" series has just been placed. Above can be seen "January 9, 2005" (56 x 80 inches, oil on canvas) which now has a home with a Toronto collector. Other works in the series have found their way into other important collections including that of the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre of the University of Guelph and (see below) the National Capitol Commission's Canadiana Fund.

This series is aptly named as Russell's paintings have a calm-inducing serenity to them. Their three-dimensionality also draw you into the works to the point that you imagine you are either standing on the edge of a vessel or the very edge of a shore, or, in a more fantastical mode, flying like a seabird just above the water surface. While Russell's current work has taken him firmly landward with a new series of paintings being prepared for his two-person "Snow" exhibition with Amir Shingray (end of November 2008 to mid-January 2009), he will be available for commissions of new "Water Meditations" work once the "Snow" works have been completed for the upcoming show.

The above "January 5, 2005" work is very representative of the style of work in the series, although each work is remarkably different even as it is clearly of one kind with the others. The occasional work in the series is a radical departure from the others, perhaps most notably "Singing Sands" (58 x 75 inches, oil on canvas) reproduced below. The Canadiana Fund acquired this work after it was shown as the centrepiece at Craig Scott Gallery in Russell's Elements of Memory show in fall 2006. Observe the marvellous cross-over in the imagery of rippling sand under the surface of shallow water and the furrows of a cerebral cortex.

Meta Gallery - new gallery to open in downtown eastside Toronto

With today's posting, I draw your attention to Meta Gallery, a new gallery in downtown eastside Toronto with a very interesting breed of art that the gallery situates within a philosophical mission of rescuing art from a perceived "over-cognitized" state of affairs in order to (re)turn to awe-inspiring beauty as art's reason for being. The gallery's opening for its inaugural (group) exhibition Mapmakers is on Friday, September 5, at its beautiful new-build space in an evolving gallery row in the Distillery District, which district is just southeast of Craig Scott Gallery. All the very best to Jody Polischuk and the rest of the Meta crew in introducing to Toronto and Canada this roster of mainly south-of-the-border artists and their lush, often intricate, work.

Two new stills selected for Samuel Chow's upcoming TIFF exhibition

We have posted a few times on Samuel Chow's upcoming I'm Feeling Lucky exhibition in association with the Toronto International Film Festival: Future Projections (and will post some more before and during the show). Part of the show will include five stills distilled from the new-media work (a 'random path network' or RPN) on display in the centre gallery while I'm Feeling Lucky projects in the north gallery. In relation to the form of the RPN and the particular Internet theme of I'm Feeling Lucky the print stills, as freeze-frames of the fluid mash-up that is the I'm Feeling Lucky experience, have an ironic quality. I will leave it to the reader to muse over that observation and will limit myself now to posting two new images, Into the Birdcage and Deer Hunting. See yesterday's post (right below this one) for Bullets and Honey.

Interview with Samuel Chow on new online art biweekly

Today's posting is a link to another blog. Mike Landry calls his newcomer art-centred weblog Things of Desire: Canada's Alternative Art Biweekly. He elicited some interesting, if deliberately elliptical, observations from Samuel Chow with respect to Chow's upcoming I'm Feeling Lucky exhibition (opens September 3, 6-9 PM) at the gallery, in association with the Toronto International Film Festival. Take a gander at Sam Chow Plays God. (Above, "Bullets and Honey" digital still from Chow's new-media work, which will be one of five prints pulled from I'm Feeling Lucky on display in the centre gallery while the random path network random-path-networks in the north gallery.)

Charity Law (2): The Tate and the Ofili Acquisition

A while ago I posted on the Beaverbrook Gallery dispute and the upcoming arbitration appeal: Art Law: "Intent", the Beaverbrook Collection and Donation Controversies. Ultimately, that dispute involved aspects of charity law in the art context. Thanks, now, to David Waterhouse for drawing my attention to another interesting charity law controversy involving a gallery, this time the UK's Tate (a path-forging art institution: see Roving Eye: Doris Salcedo at the Tate Modern). Whereas the Beaverbrook dispute dealt with whether the conveying of two major paintings, a Turner and a Freud, had been a gift by Lord Beaverbrook or merely a loan, in the Tate case, from 2006, the context is a major acquisition through money purchase by the Tate of "The Upper Room", a combined installation and set of paintings by Chris Ofili. As it transpired, Ofili was a member of the Board of Trustees when the purchase occurred and, after this fact became public through some digging by some anti-anti-art campaigners, the UK's charity commission found that the Tate, as a charity, was required as a basic principle of charity law to get advance permission when an acquisition confers a benefit on a trustee. A useful overview of the basic controversy can be found in a Bloomberg.com article, Tate Tightens Art-Buying Rules After Charity Commission Rebuke (by Linda Sandler). In it appears,

Why didn't the Tate ask permission for the Ofili purchase?
No one knew it was obliged to, [Tate Director] Serota said. No one at the Tate or at the National Audit Office or at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport had even suggested it was a general principle of charity law that if you benefit a trustee you need permission, he said.

For a 705,000 pound sterling purchase, it is hard to believe that a lawyer or two were not involved in shepherding the transaction; as for how hard it it is to believe a competent lawyer who (likely regularly) advises a major art charity did not know that advance permission was needed on these facts, I leave to you the reader.

...That said, if said lawyer was splendidly unaware that Ofili was in fact a Trustee, s/he may not have been aware of the conflict of interest that generates the charity law advance-permission requirement. In that sense, attention must fall squarely on the non-legal basic ethical compasses of everyone involved, who can be faulted if they did not intuit that a problem might just be present here. That being the case, what is the best solution for the future? Well, of course, call in another lawyer: "The Tate's reforms ... include the addition of the barrister Jules Sher to its ethics committee..."

As for Chris Ofili's "Upper Room" work, the Tate presented an exhibition with the following description:

Chris Ofili’s The Upper Room consists of thirteen paintings displayed in an environment especially designed by the architect David Adjaye. When it was first publicly exhibited in 2002, critics commented on the chapel-like qualities of the space and its lighting. The arrangement of twelve canvases flanking a thirteenth larger one suggests Christ and his Apostles, and the arrangement has an extraordinary sensory effect.
Each painting shows a rhesus macaque monkey, and each is dominated by a different colour, identified in Spanish on the elephant dung supports. In a text that accompanied the work’s first exhibition, a conservation biologist described the rhesus macaque as ‘loud, active, entertaining, fearsomely intelligent – the consummate cheeky monkey’. She also pointed out how rhesus monkeys have been venerated in certain religions, and observed that ‘monkeys may be godless but … rhesus macaques display a deeper degree of compassion for each other than do human beings’.
With this work Ofili raises questions about the relationships between civilization and untamed nature, between the religious and the secular.

I have always found Ofili's works (images thereof -- I have not yet had the fortune to see one in person) beautiful and have yet to decide whether his elephant-dung supports under his works are anything more than a gimmick. As for the rhesus monkeys, check two out. (All the others plus full picture credits can be found on the Tate site.)

Craig Scott Gallery at photo MIAMI 2008 with Maleonn

Some super news just in today. The gallery has been admitted to one of the premier photo-based art fairs in the world, photo MIAMI, for the December 3-7, 2008 fair. photo MIAMI takes place at the same time as the Basel/Miami Beach and Art Miami fairs (as well as the ten or so other satellite fairs). We are looking forward to presenting Maleonn to a new audience during what is widely recognized as the most important single art-fair weekend in North America in the annual fair calendar.

The Craig Scott Gallery proposal for a Maleonn solo exhibition was received with great enthusiasm by photo MIAMI, which is first and foremost a contemporary art fair (versus a 'straight' photography fair like some of the other leading photo-based fairs). This makes it a perfect venue for showcasing Maleonn's extraordinary work.

Look for more in future blogs with respect to the works that we plan to highlight at photo MIAMI (both work from Maleonn's first four years of production and new work being released this fall).

Zachari Logan's "Wrong Team"

As the Canadian men's baseball team lost their fourth game in a row by a single run at the Olympics, a completely random process of association suggested to me that today might be a good day to post Zachari Logan's super painting, "Wrong Team" (72" x 48", oil on canvas). It will soon be one of the centrepiece's of Logan's MFA graduation exhibition at the University of Saskatchewan (but is available to make the trip back to Toronto or anywhere else in the world). The work has already been reproduced in Border Crossings, viewed by many as one of the best art magazines in the world, in a one-page mini-feature in the magazine's August 2007 PAINT issue. If you don't get Logan's metaphorical title, shoot me an email.

Sometime in the next month or so we expect to announce Logan's participation with his drawings in two shows, one group and one solo, in continental Europe over the next six months. Now is the time to acquire some of his drawings, as we expect the currently low-side prices to rise substantially for each of these shows.

Literarture: Arturo Perez-Reverte's THE PAINTER OF BATTLES

Every now and then, I will let another interest (literature) take centre stage in the blog. I have three sub-genres in which I do some collecting and as much reading as I can manage -- legal fiction; espionage novels; and art-related fiction. For this purpose, obviously it will be art fiction that I will be recommending here and there. This first time around it is Arturo Perez-Reverte's THE PAINTER OF BATTLES (in translation by Margaret Sayers Peden, Random House, 2008; originally published in Spanish by Alfaguara in 2006). The publisher is correct, in my view, to refer to it as the Spanish writer's "most accomplished novel to date," at least from the total of five of his works I have read. His books are always intellecual thrillers at one level or another, and the Painter of Battles can be counted as one as well. That said the suspense dimension is a very very simple single question, and the essence of the novel is a meditation. It is very much in the tradition of the philosophical novel. Reviewers have tended to identify the philosophical reflection as being about the nature of cruelty and humans' seemingly infinite capacity for evil, while missing the parallel meditation about the character of (primarily documentary) photography and of painting in relation to the expression of moral truths. The central character in the book is a retired photographer of war who has turned to a mammoth mural inside an old lighthouse in a quest to express something his celebrated war photos never quitre seemed to get. There is much intertwined discussion of war and art, bolstered by evident art criticism and art history research and thought on the part of Perez-Reverte, which is entirely successful, I think, in raising important questions and prompting meaningful reflection on the part of the reader on possible answers. Fittingly, the novel ends with something of a puzzle for the reader as to what insights the central characters have gained and an arguably open-ended resolution to the 'what will happen' suspense question. In some sense, the novel sends a self-referential signal with its tantalizing ending: just where does literature and in particular fiction stand in relation both to conveying the nature of barbarity as contrasted to photography and painting and to reaching for moral 'truth.' In interesting ways, within the field of literature or more generally writing, The Painter of Battles presents a parallel structure within the life of Perez-Reverte, the war journalist (1973-1994) turned novelist (1986+), as is raised by Faulques, the war photographer turned painter of battles: where does fiction stand in relation to non-fiction, or more specifically reportage, in the search for understanding and moral truth. If you are looking for fast-paced suspense, you will find the Painter of Battles too "slow" as this otherwise-useful BookReporter.com review did. But, if you are looking for excellent writing (Perez-Reverte's best yet) with, in my view, a good balance between philosophical reflection and forward movement, then this book is highly recommended.

Maleonn with Ogilvy New York show in September

Just a teaser posting today. Stay tuned for information on a solo show in New York for Maleonn opening (at last word) September 24 or 25. It is curated by Ogilvy New York, the advertising agency, in their 8th floor non-profit gallery space. Ogilvy New York prides itself on showcasing artists who deserve to rise above the New York crowd, and we expect this exhibition to be one more stage in the rapid rise of Maleonn on the global stage, especially following so closely on standing out as a discovery artist at the Victoria & Albert's CHINA DESIGN NOW exhibition and on BBC's The Culture Show highlighting him as "one of the most exciting artists of his generation" (not to mention leading into a major museum exhibition later in the fall -- more on that at a later stage). Meanwhile, enjoy a selection from two of his most recent series, "Little Flagman No 2" and "Secondhand Tang Poems No 4."

Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady - "Trap / Elusion" Two-Person Show in October

From October 1 to October 26, the gallery presents a two-person show of new work by Anne Bertoin and Ron Eady, Trap / Elusion. The show is conceived as a dialogue between two artists whose sensibilities and styles of painting (Eady in encaustic and Bertoin in vinylique) share significant commonalities but whose conceptual thematics have different centres of gravity (even as both cross over into the fields of psychology and psychiatry as attested to by academic articles on each artist from scholars in those fields). One artist has chosen the title Trap for the artist’s contributions to the exhibition while the other artist has chosen Elusion. The viewer is invited to explore the nature of the line separating the works in Trap / Elusion. When the exhibition page is posted, I will post the link. For the moment, two images from the show are found above : upper image - Bertoin's "La Montagne", 92 x 155 cm -- and lower image -- Eady's "White Rabbit", 60 x 60 cm.

Each artist has previously had a solo show at the gallery, Eady in November 2006 (Stages of Mind) and Bertoin in January 2007 (Fractured Visions).

Toronto International Film Festival announces Samuel Chow exhibition at Craig Scott Gallery

I noted in an earlier posting that our fall season starts with Samuel Chow's I'm Feeling Lucky show. I noted that the exhibition was in association with the Toronto International Film Festival's Future Projections programme. Today, TIFF released its press release on the seven exhibitions that make up the Future Projections programme: CINEMA MEETS THE VISUAL ARTS AT TIFF08 WITH MOVING-IMAGE PROJECTSTHROUGHOUT THE CITY OF TORONTO.

Below are extracts that pertain to the Chow exhibition:

Toronto – The Toronto International Film Festival presents Future Projections, seven installation-based works with inspiredconnections to the history and the culture of cinema. Presented outside the cinema space and throughout Toronto, Future Projections continues a remarkable city-wide collaboration with leading cultural institutions, bolstering Toronto’s reputation as a centre of excellence and innovation. Venues include the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Stephen Bulger Gallery/CAMERA, Craig Scott Gallery, Katharine Mulherin ContemporaryArt Projects and the Drake Hotel. The seven installations will be offered as free, non-ticketed events.

....This year, Future Projections features a diverse array of moving-image talent, well-known visual artists Glenn Ligon and Margaux Williamson share space on the programme with emerging talents Samuel Chow, multidisciplinary artist Clive Holden and Marco Brambilla, and established film directors Srinivas Krishna and Philip Haas, approaching the gallery for the first time.

...Samuel Chow’s installation I’m Feeling Lucky presents an interconnected web of moving-image narrative paths in a constant flow of internet-derived imagery. Alluding to Google’s pervasive search button, Chow’s “random path network” mirrors our daily surfing experiences. Multi-layered moving-images interweave and collide into a seamless vibrant visual mash-up as Chow remixes and constructs a network of possibilities composed of found online videos, images and sounds from his own surfing expeditions. Our experience as voyeurs leads us into a random environment where anything can happen. Chow’s project highlights the nature of contemporary cinematic experience as heterogeneous, subjective and individually determined.
Curated by Kathleen Mullen, presented by Craig Scott Gallery in association with Future Projections. Craig Scott Gallery, 95 Berkeley Street. September 3 through 27 from Wednesday to Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Opening September 3 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew wins most prestigious art prize in Thailand

Technology can be wonderful but also frustrating at times. Today's posting for some reason ended up appearing several entries back (I am wondering if it was date-stamped from several days ago when a first version was saved in draft.) In any event, click here to view the new post buried several postings ago: Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew wins most prestigious art prize in Thailand. Two wonderful images accompany the posting.

Announcing new conceptual work by Raymond Waters: The Blackboard Series

Raymond Waters continues apace. Above is the first look of the first work in his new Blackboard Series. The above 45.25 x 66 x 4.25 inch piece is called "Terminator Seed US.Pat. 5723765 March.3, 1998." This painting under Plexiglas shows the principle theory behind the Terminator Seed US. Pat. 5723765 March.3, 1998 as it would have looked in the lab at the time of conception. Waters is most grateful for the assistance of Dr. Malcolm Campbell of the Cell and Systems Biology Department at the University of Toronto in guiding Waters' drawing for content accuracy.

Detail shots of sections of the painting can be viewed on the gallery website on Waters' Artist's Page.

Maleonn picked by Kanye West

A week ago today, Kanye West profiled Maleonn on West's much frequented (and influential) blog. Before a series of images he reproduces, West offers this perceptive summary of Maleonn's trajectory from leading commercial filmmmaker to rising (perhaps "risen" is the better word) global art star:

Maleonn, a Shanghai-based former advertising director decided 4 years ago to become a photographer. Maleonn was tired of trying to fit in, tired of catering to other peoples needs. Putting all practicality and financial security aside, he decided to pursue his desire in creating experimental photography, and the results speak for themselves. Portraying a very theatrical and often very abstract style, his work is highly emotional and attention catching and has gotten him recognition in many corners of the world.

West highlighted 12 Maleonn works. West's selection is impressive. (This blog profiling is not simply the results of his researchers: West is personally a major art collector, including such artists as Murakami in his collection.) Of all the images highlighted I would draw particular attention to one, for which a single print remains at the gallery. It is called "My Circus No 10 (Fire)" (below) and the available print is 40 x 60 cm in an edition of 15. (Of the 12 images, three are no longer available in either of their two editions and two are gone in at least one of the two editions; five are from very recent series and still generally available.)

This My Circus series was exhibited at the gallery in Transfigurations, Maleonn's first solo show outside Asia and "My Circus No 10 (Fire)" was a favourite work amongst gallery clients. My Circus was also the series that CBC and the New York Times highlighted in the "City of Dreams" show within the four-part China Rises series (first airing January 2006). (Note CBC is using his transliterated real name, Ma Liang, whereas his nom d'artiste is Maleonn.)

By the way, if you are not familiar with Kanye West, take a look at the magazine covers he has graced (including TIME, Rolling Stone, Ebony) and at his Wiki entry . West is a fascinating figure in the music world not least for his assumption of a moral leadership role such as his outspoken criticism of homophobia in some rap.

***

By the way, in the last blog posting I noted the BBC Culture Show profiling of Maleonn. The Maleonn segment can now be viewed on YouTube. It is about three minutes and really worth viewing. He offers some interesting perspectives on his work and you see shots of his studio and his preparations for his unique staged photography that is at once theatrical, filmic and painterly. Below are several shots I took on my visit with Maleonn last October in his Shanghai studio.

Update on Maleonn on the BBC's Culture Show in China

As I noted in my posting of a few days ago (last Thursday) Maleonn has been featured on BBC's The Culture Show programme, which last week focused on China to coincide with the Olympics. The show did not air here in Canada when it was scheduled to; it seems that the South Ossetia conflict between Georgia and Russia caused BBC World News to go much longer than scheduled Saturday morning. But, even though I have yet to see the episode personally, I am very reliably informed that the show did air. A correspondent writes from the UK: "At the end of the program one of the presenters singled [Maleonn's] work out as one of the standouts from her experience while there. It was shown on BBC World this evening which was when I caught it. " If and when I am able to access a video version of this episode of The Culture Show, I will direct readers to it. At the moment, the online video function is blocked for viewing outside the UK (at least that is what the pop-up window currently says).

UPDATING OF POST: The Culture Show segment, minus the host's end-of-show comments (see above), is now up on YouTube at Maleonn on The Culture Show. It is just under three minutes. It also shows Maleonn's studio, and is very good for some overview comments from Maleonn on his family background and on his thinking behind the Days on the Cotton Candy series (just shown at the Victoria and Albert). Part of the commentary from the BBC host includes the observation that Maleonn is now thought of as "one of the most exciting new photographers of his generation" -- not only in China but outside.

Art Law: "Intent", the Beaverbrook Case and Art Donation Controversies

As some readers will know, I live part of my life as Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. Although "art law" is not as such one of my areas of academic focus, there are aspects I am working on for teaching and eventual writing purposes. I hope in the next couple years to offer a Transnational Art Law course at Osgoode. In any case, the present posting is the first example of a posting designed simply to draw attention, in case some readers are interested, to some intersection of art and law.

There is a particular and a general aspect to this posting. The particular aspect is to let people know (or remind those who already know) of an arbitral hearing that will open September 22 in Frederiction in the case concerning the transfer of works from the first Lord Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, to what became New Brunswick's Beaverbrook Art Gallery (one of the gems in the Canadian gallery firmament). The case started in 2004 when the estate of Lord Beaverbrook, run by his heirs through the Beaverbrook UK Foundation, sought the return of two extremely valuable paintings in order to then sell them so that Beaverbrook property in the UK could be restored and maintained. Those two paintings in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery collection were J.M.W. Turner's Fountain of Indolence (see above left, the painting, and former Beaverbrook Gallery director Bernie Riordan in front of the Turner, 'protecting' it) and Lucian Freud's Hotel Bedroom (right), which have been estimated together as worth something like $30 million. As part of this request for return of these paintings, the Foundation claimed that only 40 of 133 works transferred to the gallery by Lord Beaverbrook were intended as gifts (meaning they belonged to the Gallery) while the rest were intended by Lord Beaverbrook simply to be loans (meaning that ownership stayed with Lord Beaverbrook and thus passed to his estate, subject to whatever the terms of the loan were). In any event, the Gallery resisted both the claim that most of its collection was merely on loan (versus permanently gifted to the Gallery) and the specific loss of these two major works, and were not mollified by the Foundation's promise that, if the Gallery returned the Turner and the Freud, it would agree to all the rest of the works staying at the Gallery. The parties agreed eventually to take the matter to arbitration, choosing former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Peter Cory as the sole arbitrator. After extensive hearings (generating some 3000+ pages of transcripts) and a period of deliberation, Cory released his arbitral ruling in March 2007. He held that the factual record showed on balance that Lord Beaverbrook conveyed artworks prior to the opening of the Gallery in 1959 as gifts to the gallery (a total of 85 artworks) while those transferred afterward were loans (48 artworks). Amongst the pre-opening 85 artworks that were thus found to be the property of the Gallery were the coveted Turner and Freud paintings. What makes this still very topical is that the Foundation has not given up and has triggered the arbitral appeal procedure that the parties had agreed to when they decided to go the arbitral route (versus using the court system). The appeal involves three former judges from various provinces, with former Chief Justice of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, Edward Bayda, to chair the appeal that will open September 22. He is joined by two other former judges, Coulter Osborne (Ontario) who was chosen by the gallery, and Thomas Braidwood (British Columbia) who was chosen by the Beaverbrook U.K. Foundation -- by the arbitral procedure, these two judges selected Bayda to be the third member and chair. The case will be interesting for the art-law issues (involving mostly what kinds of reasoning and presumptions to use when evaluating the factual record to determine whether the intent of a person transferring artwork to a charitable institution was to be a donor or a lender).

But the case also is of more general interest. It triggers some free associating about the various ways in which art transfers to charitable institutions can create fraught issues for trust law and tax law. A really interesting article in Fortune magazine ("Giver's remorse -- Be careful what you ask for: Donors and recipients are contesting what gifts are - and when they can be taken back," by Tyler Green) uses the Beaverbrook case as a launching pad for discussing how these issues arise. Tyler Green touches on historic cases such as Georgia O'Keeffe's gifts of her own artworks (and subsequent wishes by the recipients to sell the work to raise cash) and the move of the Barnes museum from its intended location to Philadelphia (an art world scene that Barne detested). A longish but engaging read. Recommended. Note that the article was written just before the Cory ruling came down, which is why it does not discuss the result of the dispute.

From Cello to Stone - Set of Six Bikkers' Monoworks and Three Lithograph Portraits Now Available

IMAGES: [upper left] Rudolf Bikkers and Yo-Yo Ma inspecting Bikkers' From Cello to Stone mixed-media work (the work "Suite No. 6 - Gavotte" being shown in the photo); [above right] Bikkers and Ma before one of Bikkers' limited-edition stone lithograph portraits of Ma; [first work after text] Yo-Yo Ma portrait (edition of 75); [second work after text] mixed-media monowork, "Suite No. 3 - Bourrée"; [third work after text] Johann Sebastian Bach portrait (edition of 75); [fourth work after text] mixed-media monowork, "Suite No. 1 - Allemande."

One goal of the blog is to let folks know when a works or works become available. And so we announce that Rudolf Bikkers’ From Cello to Stone, one-of-a-kind set of six monoworks interpreting J S Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites (as interpreted in performance by Yo-Yo Ma), is now available along with three limited-edition stone lithograph portraits of Bach, Ma and the artist. Click through HERE or on any of the above links in the "Images" section to see larger versions and also to scroll through the entire set of 9 works. The monoworks have been created by a combination of colour lithographs pulled from limestone and acrylic painting. The entire set of nine (9) works, accompanied by an elegant steel case, is available for $30,000 Canadian. Outside the set, the three limited-edition portraits are available for $1650 each or, as a set of 3, for $4400. The edition for each portrait is 75.

Of the From Cello to Stone works were released a decade ago, Robert Fulford, one of Canada's greatest all-time arts writers, writes that, like Bach’s music and Ma’s interpretations of that music, “Bikkers’ prints have achieved the bracing, clear as- a-mountain-stream clarity that illustrates a remark by Northrop Frye: ‘The simple, which is the opposite of the commonplace, is normally one of the last secrets of art to be mastered.’” Fulford concluded his essay entitled "Seeing Music" by noting how the works of both Bach (the Cello Suites) and Bikkers (the visualization of Bach’s music) share a “wondrous sense of order,” adding:

Order can never be far from the mind and instincts of artists, whether musical or visual. We humans are pattern-making animals. We spend much of our lives searching for an order that transcends, in a place we cannot name, the chaotic world in which we live. Art, says Schopenhauer, rescues us, if only for a short time, from our narrow, limiting obsession with self, and moves us “into the state of pure knowledge.” This is the achievement of Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites in the Yo-Yo Ma performances, an achievement to which Rudolf Bikkers provides a richly appropriate accompaniment.

Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew wins most prestigious painting prize in Thailand

Two months before I first saw Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew's work, after tracking it down in Bangkok, Nimmalaikaew had just won the 2006 Sovereign Asia Art Prize. The next February (2007) Craig Scott Gallery presented Introducing Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew, at age 27 his first-ever solo show (actually, he may have been still 26 at the time). The work above was the centrepiece in that 2007 show: "Body (Mom) No 3," Inkjet on one layer of canvas and oil painting on two outer layers of mosquito netting, with thread superimposed, 80" high x 40" wide x 24" deep at the bottom. (Readers may wonder how it was that the Craig Scott Gallery show was Nimmalaikaew's first-ever solo show. The answer is that, to that point, a critical mass of his labour-intensive and time-consuming works did not accumulate enough for a solo show as they were constantly winning corporate art competitions -- upon which the winning pieces would then be acquired by the competition sponsor. Apart from that, he is such a perfectionist that he spent a considerable period developing his amazing process and combination of techniques before he was satisfied with the inaugural piece.)

And now word just in that Nimmalaikaew has just received the First Prize / Gold Medal in Thailand's 54th annual National Exhibition of Art in the Painting category (there is no overall category). Gold Medalists are often referred by shorthand as recipients of a National Art Prize. First Prize in any of the categories is the most coveted art award in Thailand, and Painting traditionally takes pride of place. It is open to works submitted from artists of all generations and stature, including recognized senior masters. And he is only 28. (That said, he was only 25 when he won the same Gold Medal / 'National Art Prize' in Painting in the 51st annual National Exhibition of Art.)

The winning work, Mom's Chair 180x200x160 cm (see below), speaks for itself. In place of the two layers of mosquito netting from the above piece, Nimmalaikaew is now painting on both thread and mesh with glass as an added layer. As you can see from the photograph showing the photographer, one of the pleasures of the piece is that viewers themselves become part of the work as they stand in front of it. (The photo is not yet a professional one, so for the moment you will have to use your imagination just a little.) By the way, there is one sister piece to this winning work available and it can be seen on the gallery website HERE.

Maleonn: From Recognition at the Victoria & Albert to the BBC Culture Show during the Beijing Olympics

Today's posting is a quick one. This morning I saw one of the works from Maleonn’s Days on the Cotton Candy series flash up on a BBC World News trailer (channel 194 in Toronto). It was so fast I did not firmly register which work, but it seemed to have been Days on the Cotton Candy No 6 (reproduced above).

That work and others will be profiled as part of BBC’s The Culture Show in China, which airs Eastern Standard Time at 10:10 on Saturday, August 9. It will include an interview of Maleonn and shots of his studio in Shanghai. If you happen to be around the TV for the Beijing Olympics, you may want to channel surf to BBC to see how they use his work in their show.

This series is (at least, on the surface) the most pop-culture-y of all Maleonn's series to date, and very different from a series like Secondhand Tang Poems (about which more in later blog), but, as with all his work, there is more sub-text than first meets the eye. Certainly, from an external perspective, the series' location at the intersection of fine art photography and (theatrically constructed) design caught the eye of the curators of the recently-ended huge CHINA DESIGN NOW exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Four works from Days on the Cotton Candy were displayed, and one of them (Days on the Cotton Candy No 4, below) was given pride-of-place treatment in the book published by the V and A to coincide with the exhibition by having a section of the work being reproduced as a full two-page spread as the first photograph in the 158-photo, 190-page book, immediately after the Table of Contents: Zhang Hongxing and Lauren Parker, China Design Now (London: Victoria and Albert Publishing, 2008).